Put Your Face in Ghost Recon Tutorial

Introduction

This guide will teach you how to put your very own face in Ghost Recon. I came into doing this after reading the "Ghost Recon Skin Tutorial" by Ruin in the GhostRecon.net RECON Section. I haven't seen any other tutorials that teach you how to do this, so I decided to write one.

What You Will Need

• Digital Camera, or a photo of your face on your hard drive
• Ghost Recon RSB Conversion Utility
• Adobe Photoshop (or any good image editor) and basic knowledge of its use.
• RSB Plugin for Adobe Photoshop

Getting Started

In this tutorial, I decided to put make myself a rifleman, but you could also do this to any Specialist or other class soldier.
First, go to your Ghost Recon Directory\Mods\Origmiss\Textures folder and make a copy of the Allied folder there, then use the RSB Conversion Utility and convert everything in the Allied folder copy we just made. Then, depending on your skin color, choose a texture you want to use. In the texture name, you will find an abbreviation of the race/skin color the texture is.

• icg_asn_cmo: Asian skin
• icg_blk_cmo: Black skin
• icg_hsp_cmo: Hispanic skin
• icg_wht_cmo: White skin

Note: The number and whether it's a "blink" skin doesn't matter, since the only thing they differ in is the face, which we're going to edit.

Changing the Face

Now open the skin of your choice, mine was icg_wht_cmo_**. Now open your face picture, or anything with your face in it. Now, try to cut your face in the shape of the skins face. I have marked how I basically cut out my face. Since my picture was kind of small, I had to resize it also.

Use the red line as a guide line in what shape you cut out your face, or as long as its anything close, also, make sure not to cover the helmet straps,or else it will kind of look stupid with the straps missing on the chin only.

That's how it should look about, since I had to resize my face, which made it all blurry. I suggest if you have to resize yours, just use the Sharpen tool in your image editor.

Perfecting the Face

Now, select the layer with your face only (in Photoshop, when you paste something in, it automatically creates a new layer for it) and go to the Image menu, choose Adjust and under that sub-menu select Levels..., as you could see, my skin is way to bright, it doesn't match the rest.

So I had to darken it as well as change the hue and saturation. Just go to Image, Adjust and take Hue/Saturation. Of course, you have to figure out what you have to do to make it match, I'm just giving examples of what I had to do in my case. Now I look something like this

Here's the tricky part, you could still see the difference between my face and the rest of the skin. So, right click on the Layer icon with the face and choose Select Layer Transparency. Then go to the Select menu, go under Modify and take Border, in the pixel box, put in 4, we don't want it to be too big to mess up the skin. Then go to Filter, Blur and choose Blur More. Then, blur any areas that stick out using the Lasso tool to select them.

Now your face should look something like this:

This is good, there's not much of a difference between the rest of the skin and the face, and since we blended it, the face doesn't stand out. Now go to the Layer menu, and take Flatten Image. Put the skin into one layer. Now, go to File and choose Save As Copy, when the Save window appears, make sure it says Save as: RSBBitmap (*.RSB;*.RSB) and save the skin to Mods\Origmiss\Textures\Allied, since we're going to make a new rifleman, don't overwrite anything! It's not necessary, just name it whatever you like, I named it myface.rsb.

Creating a "Blink" face"

It's basically the same thing but with eyes closed, hoping that you still left our previous face open, and save it already as specified, open the same skin we modified, but the "blink" version, it ends with _blink. Now take the Lasso tool and select the right eye as seen here.

Copy that, then past it on your right eye, adjust the Levels and Hue/Saturation on it as we did before with the face. It should look something like this.

Now, right-click on the Layer icon of the eyelid you just pasted, and take Select Layer Transparency. And again, do a Border of 4 as with the face before. Then, do Blend More, do it until it's good enough for you. Now it should look somewhat like this.

The thing is about the "blink" skin though, it shows once in a while for a split second, when the character blinks in the game, so it doesn't have to be that detailed. But there's no eyebrow there though, and that has to be fixed. Use the pencil tool and draw a crooked line like this.

This should have all been done in the layer with the eyelid. Now select the eyelid layer if it isn't already and just go to Filters and do Blur More twice, now it should look something like this.

Which is good enough, now right-click on the eyelid layer, and select duplicate and press Ok. Then, select the duplicate layer and go to Edit, Transform and flip it horizontally and move it over to the other eye. Now it should look like this.

Now all you have to do is Merge the layers again, and go to the File menu and choose Save as Copy and save this to Mods\Origmiss\Textures\Allied, call this myfaceblink, make sure you're saving it as RSBBitmap again.

Creating your own character

This is the part where we actually put yourself in the game. I decided to make myself a rifleman, I went to \Mods\Origmiss\Actor\rifleman and copied rifleman-01 or anything, doesn't really matter, just give it a number that's not there, or if you want, just open up the original one and do the same thing we do to the copy, except instead of giving it a different name, just save it.

So open up that .ATR file using Notepad, and just read the whole thing, now you're going to find out that you can do quite much in this little file. But most importantly, go to where it says <ActorName>(Name of rifleman)</ActorName>, there you could put in your own name to appear in game.

Now change the face texture to the one we created, so where it says <ModelFace>(whatever filename)</ModelFace>, put <ModelFace>myface.rsb</ModelFace>, and the BlinkFaceName to <BlinkFaceName>myfaceblink.rsb</MyFaceBlink>.

You could also change the stats here for those of you who want your character to have Specialist-like abilities or who just want to beef him up, the Max number of points is 8, so don't overdo it. Now, if you're overwriting a character like I said in the beginning, just save it, if you're not, than see which number isn't taken (I think they only go to 60, but not sure) and save it with that number as rifleman-**.atr (** being the free number).

Also, you could make your own skin for the entire model, if you want to than refer to the Ghost Recon Skin Tutorial by Ruin at GhostRecon.net's RECON Section..

The face so far.

Face Painting

I already made an authentic Polish Army uniform, and I proudly kill Terrorists now. The person you are looking at in this picture will be me in my homeland's uniform with face painting, which is easy to do, just make a new layer under the head skin layer, change the head skin layer from Normal to Multiply, and draw a couple of green lines, I just opened up a random face texture from the Allied folder and drew the same lines. So now your faces should start looking somewhat like this

Shot
Jan 2003